When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”
-St. John's Gospel, chapter 11
I have always had a very concrete sense of loss. I was very young when I learned the inevitable truth of life: that all things are doomed to sail across the horizon of your own perception and disappear from the waking world. I can see the light of a similar realization when I speak, as I have lately, to my four-year-old daughter about death. The neighbor's cat, her aunt's dog, all these little perishings of animals have added up to that dreadful question: "Daddy, are you going to die too? Am I going to die?" And the inevitable, sad reply: "Yes, baby girl. Everyone does."
Even if someone doesn't die, in the literal sense, we experience many small deaths, almost constantly. Being a parent is a series of small deaths, often unnoticed: the last time you could comfortably give your child a piggy-back ride, the last time you read them that one story that they loved, the last time they got up in the middle of the night to sneak into your bed because they were afraid and needed you to comfort them. These are often never acknowledged, even as they continue to occur, even as they populate all other areas of our lives: the last time your favorite barista made your coffee just the way you like it or the last time you saw a friend for lunch before his job took him to a new city. You kept in touch for years afterward, but never like that. Not as two people meeting one another face-to-face, but as ships passing in the night, or like ghosts floating past one another with a gentle nod: well-wishing without substance.
And society groups many of these small deaths under the umbrella of change. And change can sound benign. Change can be a cause for celebration: a "change of pace," or a "change of scenery." Moving up, moving out. Out with the old, in with the new. After all, how can you grieve a job that was never that good to you? Or a house that had that one stubborn leak under the sink that no plumber could seem to permanently fix? And who would want their child to stay a child forever? I certainly wouldn't want that.
Religion tells us that (at least some of) the loss associated with change is an illusion; it is temporary. Loved ones die, we will see them again in heaven. Yet, even these "temporary separations," rend the very heart of God himself.
Jesus is described as weeping three times in the New Testament: for Lazarus (in the section quoted above), for the impending judgement upon Jerusalem, and in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Jesus weeps for Lazarus, why? I think it probable that he does this because, in that moment, he experiences the loss of his friend the way you or I would. He perhaps thinks of Lazarus, gray and still and overcome by the corruption of the grave, his soul bound in Sheol, waiting in darkness. The fact that he will soon be resurrected does not prevent him from weeping, in fact, perhaps it heightens his sorrow all the more. For as he weeps, the question resounds around him from the onlookers: "He had the power to cure the blind, he had the power to heal this man. He let him die."
When Jesus regards Jerusalem, and the people who will welcome him as a king and then crucify him like a common criminal: he weeps. They will not turn from the path of perdition. It does not matter that, in the eschaton, there will be the New Jerusalem. God weeps for the Jerusalem there in front of him, with its holiness and its sin, which is passing away.
And when he weeps in the Garden, he weeps in his anguish, his grief "unto death," not merely for his own suffering (which will be great) but for the suffering that his disciples will suffer for his sake: to be separated from him by the grave, even for a mere three days, to be bereft of their beloved teacher, and for all of their eventual lives of toil, hard travelling, deprivation, and eventual martyrdom. Gethsemane marks the end of his public ministry on earth in the strictest, most intimate sense. That he will ascend to glory, and his disciples likewise does not wipe the tears from his eyes.
I think the myriad tears of Christ reveal something about the power sorrow has to imbue the world with significance. That is not to say that it is appropriate to dwell on every passing, fleeting thing as it darts away from us. It is, however, my belief that sorrow, rightly understood, is at the core of a certain type of spiritual life. I have written previously about the boddhisatva path in Mahayana Buddhism, the vow of compassion for all sentient creatures. There is a certain sense in which to weep, to feel sorrow, can be the outward sign of the inward movement of compassion which in the Christian tradition we call agape and among the Buddhists is the compassionate bodhicitta.
We make a mistake when we pit sorrow against joy. Though it is popular wisdom these days to posit that: "The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference," a greater and more correct maxim, in my mind, is: "The opposite of joy is not sorrow," for joy and sorrow come from the same source: an overflowing and abundant love.
We should always feel sorrow for creatures, even if, in the case of a good death, it is only sorrow for ourselves that we must be deprived of our loved ones for the little while we sojourn here upon the earth. But, I think it even appropriate to cultivate a sorrow for the passing of the seasons, the days of our lives, the wholesome pleasures of God's good but impermanent world, for what we grieve is the passing away of those smudged images of the Good that sustain us here before we see Goodness itself face-to-face. To see God in these smaller things and lament their passing away is a good pedagogue, insofar as it teaches us to yearn ever more for God himself; that God who suffers, that God who sorrows, that God who weeps.